http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/05/26-4
Both the article and the comments display an utter lack of understanding of basic economics. Some good ones:
“It was the first to establish the right to free education for all — public education.”
“The parasitic insurance companies just shuddered. Single payer is coming and they can’t stop it.”
I don’t know, believing that nationalization of industry creates goods and services out of thin air seems more like ignorance of basic physics.
I agree. If we nationalize everything, we can abolish scarcity!
Yeah. Well, that was Lenin’s plan. That’s what communism is; attempting to make resources abundant by abolishing the system that conveys their scarcity through prices. What communists expect, in effect, is that physical objects will appear out of thin air because we take away the need to pay for them. Now we see that communism fails on a much more elementary level than the calculation problem or even the incentive problem. It ignores basic physics! Nationalized health care applies the same fallacy, just on a single industry. And because the rest of the economy (and other countries) now subsidize that industry, and because of various statistical trickeries and cherry-picked national comparisons, it appears utterly plausible that nationalized health care creates a free lunch. My question to those people is always “if it works with health care, why not do it with cars and houses?”. I have never gotten a proper response. Part of the problem is that the assumption of a free lunch, of resources appearing out of thin air, is never conscious, but always implicit. They never think “let’s make health care free because then we can consume resources that would otherwise not exist”. They come up with some cover story. Just as the Zeitgeisters, they come up with some plausible reasons why their system would be more efficient. E.g. low administrative overhead, no profit, price controls, wisdom of experts, “science”, automation, etc. But in reality all these are a way to disguise the implicit belief in a free lunch. That’s why this meme, the belief in a free lunch, persists in human society like a resilient tapeworm; it’s impossible to argue against a fallacy that your opponent isn’t even aware of.
Whenever I see someone actually go to countries with socialized medicine and get on tape the terrible results there are always people from those countries that say that they got it all wrong. This makes my brain hurt. Shouldn’t the people that actually live in these countries know best what kind of healthcare they’re getting?
One thing that I noticed is that they seem to have very low time preference. They don’t really seem to care that there are month long waiting lists, or that people get preferential treatment based on their condition.
Could someone post some good sources concerning the results of socialized medicine? This seems like a good place for it.
Thanks.
I would like to see some of these as well.
Nero, Apparently what differentiates health care from cars is that health care is a “necessity”. It’s something we’ll see more and more with economic prosperity. As more and more of what used to be luxuries become common place, they will go from being luxuries to being “rights” and people will accordingly think we are entitled to them. see how these days there is a feeling that home-ownership is a right?
Seraiah, I agree. I think they fall in love with the anti-profit motive to such a degree that they overlook any flaws the system may have and just rationalize it so it doesn’t offend their worldview. Maybe that or they get accustomed to it out of inertia.
No. Only the zealots and people that don’t use health care like the system. By “like” I mean they gulp their own medicine as bitter as it may be and pretend to like it for posterity. Canada and Britain have something you don’t. We have our own “Novosti” press agencies. Britain is especially bad. They run propaganda in all the media all day every day telling you what to like, what to believe, what to do and how to do it. It’s like having your gramma follow you around all day. Everyone is just hounded by a ceaseless barrage of dogma. In Canada, the single payer system that we got in the 70’s is PC, enforced by a dedicated smear bund. You would be less conspicuous saying, “Nigger, spic, chink, gook,” than saying, “abolish OHIP”. Basically, it takes guts to take a stand on that side of the issue.
Yeah, that’s what they say. I don’t see how that changes the economics of it though. Whether something is “necessary” or just nice to have, it requires scarce resources to be produced and there are opportunity costs. Declaring something a necessity does not mean the free lunch strategy suddenly works. Necessity would be an argument for transferring resources from other uses to that use, but that does not mean nationalized health care more efficient. Economically health care is the same as cars or houses.
The whole nationalized/single-payer health-care issue is about one group of people trying to coerce another group into preferring the first group’s lives over their own. What I find hilarious about this is that the first group, in their coercion, claims that the second group is being greedy! Where’s that line about taking the beam out of your own eye before pointing out the mote in your brother’s?
Do you have some statistics, or have you written more about your personal experience in this? I’d be very interested in reading it.
For anyone interested
Check out this paper
It’s nothing new. Just ye olde bread line. Everything you would predict theoretically perfectly characterizes it. You can find statistics if you dig a hole to China for them. For example, the U.N. publishes the World Health Report, which often rates health systems. The trick is, you have to read the fine print to see exactly how the ratings are made. Otherwise, you are simply looking at 67.5% weighting for a slew of disparity measurements that are oh so important for the WHO agenda. (Which is to force the wealthy minority of the world to pay for health care for "every person in every village on Earth.)
“I don’t know, believing that nationalization of industry creates goods and services out of thin air seems more like ignorance of basic physics.”
LOL!!!
Classic!